The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly …
There is a great deal of absurdity in “Haven” and a great number of undeveloped or underdeveloped themes. That, however, as I’ll explain, is an unfair critique on my part. The good, the bad, and the ugly … this episode is mostly “the Ugly.”
First, we have Troi’s brash mother. No one would accuse Marjel Barret of being a versatile or nuanced actor, but in contrast to some, I’ve never hated her character here. I do not cringe when she appears, and her loudness, by shifting the frame, makes her truly comforting in her more gentle scenes, such as when she talks toward the end with Rob Knepper’s Wyatt.
A second bit of ugliness: a constant itch throughout … this feeling that I knew the actor playing Wyatt from something else. He looked so familiar, his face was just distinctive enough. And his outfit, with its point-down triangle in the front, his almost feathered hair … I would have placed him in an early- to mid-80s Euro-pop group. But when I looked him up later, I realized that the only thing I knew him from was the final season of ‘Heroes,’ where he played bad-guy Samuel, and from the second season of ‘Stargate Universe’ (a plodding but underrated sci-fi drama, I must say) where he played a similarly flawed character.
Here he is anything but flawed or ugly, and he’s also truly good. He is gracious around Riker, he wants to help others, in a ‘Princess Bride’ move he follows “true love” (even when its origins or motivations with regard to the plot are hand-waved away), and so on. The role of ‘petty’ is assigned to Riker, who upon finding out that Troi is going to marry—and upon meeting her rather diminuitive suitor—pouts his way through the more-or-less low-key episode.
The episode lacks in well-developed or motivated storylines. Troi’s marriage will take her from the Enterprise, though ‘why’ is never really explained, but while this should be the or at least an emotional kernel in this story, frankly we haven’t come to know or love Troi enough (being generous here) to care whether she stays or whether she goes. Her interactions to date in the series have focused around stating the obvious—blandly, at that—to Picard, offering condescending love-life advice to Yar, and being to chemistry what anti-matter is to matter when dealing with Riker.
It may be true that stage and film acting are different beasts, that the stage actor, dealing with a live audience at a distance, in the moment, has to ‘do it all’ and that in contrast the film/TV actor has multiple takes, lighting folks, camera operators, a whole crew helping them, so the story goes, so they can act ‘smaller’:
When I interviewed Janet Leigh in 1998 around the time that the remake of “Psycho” came out, I asked her what she thought was the most important piece of advice that a movie actor could hear. She told me that “Eureka!” moment came during production of the 1953 western “The Naked Spur” when director Anthony Mann took her aside after a bad take, indicated the camera, the lights and the makeup people, and told her, “See all these people, dear? They’re here for you, and they’re acting with you. You don’t have to do so much.” That’s the fundamental difference between stage acting, in which the performer stands more or less alone, and screen acting, a collaborative enterprise in which the actor’s work is being supported, magnified and interpreted by off-screen craftspeople. Janet Leigh learned the lesson well. She never seems to be shouldering weight that is not hers to carry.
But there is a difference between “acting small” and “barely acting.” And it is perhaps no surprise that it is Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner, the two theatrically-oriented cast members (as Susie noted!), who are most comfortable in their roles, who most convince, and who most capture our attention so far in the series. I’m not counting John de Lancie’s bacon-express at this point. I previously mentioned Stewart having more eye (or facial) expressions than the rest of the cast combined; this barely changes here, when on a take-by-take basis Frakes and Sirtis settle into a single expression and at best glacially slide through it. And let’s not even talk of body language or lack there of, though there are amusing points where Riker does strike poses and sulk.
And it was this acting ugliness that made me realize that I’d been falsely judging ST:TNG so far … I’d been holding it to modern standards of television, television in which we get Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson, Victor Garber, and many other “character actors” in juicy roles balancing more one-note pretty-boy performers like Jennifer Garner or Matthew Fox. TNG is not yet a “television drama” … it’s a soap opera with delusions of grandeur. It just has a higher per-episode budget and slower rate of production. And it’s not the actors’ faults, per se … it’s the writers, who give most characters exposition, techno-babble, and punchlines instead of dialog. I say ‘not a television drama’ because our more or less modern/contemporary understanding of such beasts is that they are serial or episodic, in the last few years especially tending toward the serial. TNG commits to neither … each episode is an aborted soap opera episode where balls are thrown in the air, supposedly to be juggled later in an endless cycle, but more often than not they never come down, defying gravity at the least. Then they return when you least expect them.
As mere motifs we’ve been hitting the “love” angle all season long, from Riker and Troi’s first encounter (… at Farpoint!) to Crusher & Picard’s awkward doorway closeness episodes ago, to Data and Yar, more Yar and the man of the week, a planet of free love, and even a potential wedding. It’s too much for the purely episodic, but not unified enough to be a ‘theme’ or ‘plot strand’ for something serial. We get more pontification on the Prime Directive and similar Federation moral mandates … here there is both a dimplomatic treaty to be enforced as well as a promise to help those in need … two things that come into conflict when a treaty demands the enterprise protect Haven from those in need …
… it’s actually, along with the other Philosophy 101 ethical conundrums from which TNG steals its conflicts, a good idea, but one that is poorly executed. The representative from Haven has no charisma and only the treaty obligation would make anyone want to help her … but she’s not even well-developed enough for us to despise while at the same time agreeing that we must help. And the resolution? It marries—so to speak—our “A” and “B” stories (Haven and the approaching plague ship; Troi and Wyatt) and solves them both, but solving A with B means that A, which had a true conflict, is not actually resolved by anything “story-internal.” It’s a sloppy cheat.
Speaking of Wyatt … I kind of like the “have been dreaming of this woman since childhood” fated-to-be-true-love idea. But that she would be on the plague ship? No surprise. The Troi and Wyatt interaction in the wake of it? Too bland. Troi’s face when she sees the other woman—or the other woman’s abs—for the first time? Priceless. But Lwaxana‘s all-too-brief explanation?
In short it’s the idea that “consciousness,” whatever that is, ill-defined and used really as a cipher, permeates the universe/existence and is, furthermore, “one,” so that it is actually no surprise that two people at great distances could “know” each other … it’s only the willful ignorance, or, rather, obtuseness of uptight races like humans, that keeps this obvious truth from being more widely accepted. So Lwaxana indicates. This idea, though, is treated as a mere MacGuffin of sorts … not even that. It’s a non-explanation explanation and it is meant to seem profound (otherwise Lwaxana is just a crazy old woman and Wyatt a fool for listening to her … you be the judge). To treat it seriously (or at leasst sincerely) requires us to accept at least one of two propositions, one of which is quite stupid. The first is the stupid one … that we accept a stupid, woo-ey, Deepak Chopra-esque New Ageism about how “all is one” … a vague, meaningless statement at best and an emperically false one whenever it is taken from “the vague” to “the precise”; or, more wisely and with connection to Wesley, we take this as a thematic nod of sorts in our not-yet-serial world—to Wesley and the Traveler—in which “thought” was posited to underly both space and time (again, a woo-ish interprestation of Quantum Mechanics seems to linger in the background here). That would tell us something about the “Star Trek” universe, at least the universe of TNG, and given Q’s so far frequent appearances, the Traveler, and now this matter of Wyatt, we’d have something close to a motif, a theme, a guiding concept to future developments.
That, of course, is not the case.
